May 27, 2004
Mark Flood at American Fine Arts
An Artforum.com review of the Mark Flood exhibition on view through this Saturday at American Fine Arts. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
At American Fine Arts, Texas-based artist Mark Flood presents collages made in the 1980s and paintings made over the last two years. The collages, tucked away in the back room, are made from multiple copies of mid-'80s promotional posters the artist stockpiled while working at a record shop. Each celebrity is comically reconfigured, often with a grossly enlarged head; one featuring Michael Jackson is uncannily prescient of that star’s later surgical transformations. The large paintings in the main space play a more serious game. Each work, executed in a handful of sharp, contrasting colors, presents the indexical mark of a ripped piece of lace—laid down on the canvas, painted over, then removed—atop a more or less monochrome background. Up close, one can see flowers and other motifs emerge from the patterning; step away, and the irregularly shaped splashes of color are nearly abstract. That the “representational” parts of each painting are simultaneously direct traces of an existing object and once-removed depictions of something else makes the act of deciphering them delightfully complex.